Office 2003 SP3 Update: Just over 30 days and it starts to be available via Microsoft Update automatic distribution

Just wanted to give you a heads up on our promised 30 days notice before making Office 2003 SP3 available via Microsoft Update automatic distribution (for Vista and XP). We released SP3 for Office 2003 to customers about 4 months ago. Since then we’ve heard some great feedback on what it is doing for customers be it in the enterprise, consumer, or other segments. In some cases people probably don’t even know that it’s working for them, which is just perfect. The security improvements are working just like they should in that case :).

That said, we wanted to use the MU blog as one of many avenues to alert our customers to the fact that we will be distributingSP3 automatically via Microsoft Update approximately 30 days from January 27th. We say approximately because the availability will happen gradually and not everyone will see it at the same time. Think of the 27th as the marker and no sooner than 30 days from then is when SP3 will start to become available to customers' systems.

This announcement gels with the policy we made public in conjunction with the release of SP1 for the 2007 Microsoft Office System (no sooner than 3 months we will give customers 30 days notice that we are going to use Microsoft Update automatic distribution). This policy seems to have worked really well with SP3 because it gave the market plenty of time to evaluate the service pack, gave us time to address concerns, and now we can push it to the hundreds of millions of users who depend on us to keep them secure, up to date, and productive and they can be comfortable and informed with regards to the improvements they are getting. We take this responsibility seriously and it’s why we invested so much in SP3.